Sarah Jessica Parker biography

Long before becoming the infamous “Carrie Bradshaw”, the fickle heroine and fashionista from the hit series “Sex and the City”, Sarah Jessica Parker had graced our screens since the 1980s, taking small parts in both big budget and small budget films.

Born in Ohio, 1965, Sarah Jessica Parker (SJP) is the fourth of eight children, born into a very ordinary family.

Her mother is a Primary School Teacher and her father is an aspiring author.
In order to help her parents, she studied singing and dance from a young age. She landed her first role in television at eight years old.

At the age of eleven, the young girl trod the boards on Broadway in the play “The Innocents”. From then on, her whole family followed the young prodigy and moved to New Jersey to be nearer to New York, where SJP worked for several more years.

It was in 1970 that the company “The Sound of Music” offered SJP her first major role: she landed the lead part in the musical “Annie” on Broadway from 1979-1980.

In 1982, SJP turned her attention to television. She made her debut in the TV film “My Body, My Child” and in a season of the series “Square Pegs”.

She then turned her attention to cinema, making brief appearances in the 1984 film “Footloose”, alongside Kevin Bacon, then landing a starring role in the 1985 film, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”.

SJP made a name for herself taking small parts in films such as “L.A. Story”, alongside Steve Martin in 1992, “Honeymoon in Las Vegas” with Nicolas Cage in 1993, “Striking Distance”, with Bruce Willis in 1994, she also starred alongside Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood”.

She went on to scoop a starring role in “Miami Rhapsody” in 1995, before working with Tim Burton again in “Mars Attacks” in 1996. In the same year she also had a small part in Wood Allen’s TV film “The Sunshine Boys”.

The big turning point in her career came in 1998, when she was selected for the role of “Carrie Bradshaw”, a journalist and very well connected New Yorker, in “Sex and the City”.

Sex and the City was an international success, with women falling in love with the fashion as well as the characters. Every woman on the planet could see a part themselves in one of the characters. Which Sex and the City girl are you? Take the quiz and find out!

The show made an icon of SJP. She won the Golden Globe Award for “Best Actress in a Television Series” in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004. After six seasons, the series finally came to an end in 2004.

However, far from taking it easy, SJP played the main part in the 2005 Christmas romantic comedy “The Family Stone”, where she showed she had a talent for comedy. The following year, she starred alongside Matthew McConaughey in the romantic comedy “Failure to Launch”.

In 2008, “Sex and the City” made its comeback, however this time on the big screen. SJP stepped back into Carrie’s “Manolo Blahniks”, Kim Cattrall revived the habits of the sulphurous Samatha, Kristin Davies those of the delicate Charlotte and Cynthia Nixon as the very independent Miranda.

We saw the continuation of the “Big” and “Carrie” affair, designer couture was in abundance and we were all older! The sequel “Sex and the City 2” was released in 2010, where the lovely “Aidan” made his come back but the movie was critically paned as one long advertorial for the Abu Dhabi tourist board and Marc Jacobs.

Aside from her acting career, SJP has also moved into perfume and clothing. She launched her first perfume “Lovely”, in 2005, with her second fragrance, “Covet”, released in 2007. She also has her own clothing range, “Bitten”.

SJP has also been involved UNICEF and is one of their representatives for Performing Arts. She is also the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for the United States.

In her private life, SJP was in a very long-term relationship with Robert Downey Jr, whom she was with from 1984-1991 and she has also dated John F. Kennedy Jr, the son of the former President of the United States.

In May 1997 she married actor Matthew Broderick. The couple have three children. Their son, James Wilke Broderick, was born 28 October 2002 and their twin girls, Marion Loretta Elwell and Tabitha Hodge, were born to a surrogate in June 2009.